The Company
PetClassifieds launched in the US market in early 2020. They offer a marketplace for buyers and sellers to place ads for pets that are available for sale or adoption. While dogs and cats are the most popular pets featured on their website, they also have listings for birds, rabbits and reptiles to name a few.
Fun Fact
The top 5 breeds in the US are German Shepherds, Pitbulls, Siberian Huskies, Labs /Retrievers and French Bulldogs.
The Challenge
The PetClassifieds team saw a big opportunity in the US to build a website that made it easier for pet breeders and prospective pet owners to connect. In the beginning, PetClassifieds was very dependent on AdSense for generating nearly half of their revenue. They encountered a technical issue with AdSense resulting in a severe drop in traffic. During this 2 week period, they were unable to get personalized support from an actual human and were limited to email support. The back and forth on email was a painful process, prolonging the issue and resulting in significant revenue loss.
In addition to a negative past experience, PetClassifieds wanted to choose a technology that was continuously adaptive and able to respond to emerging changes in business strategies, advertising logistics, programmatic technologies and data regulations.
PetClassifieds also wanted to be able to identify opportunities in real-time, understand the market dynamics of those opportunities and capitalize on their value. As a growing company, they knew machine learning was an important component of unveiling which traffic sources worked best, and how to reach their audience.
As a new and growing company, PetClassifieds was dependent on paid advertising to build awareness and drive traffic to their website. In the beginning, paid advertising accounted for 50% of their traffic and the cost was significant. Their goal was to grow their revenue without having to increase their ad spend.
The Solution
In search of a true partner that would be available and vested in their success, PetClassifieds searched social news aggregation sites for ratings and discussions about programmatic ad partners in the US. PetClassifieds wanted to be sure that the solution they chose would operate as an extension of their team, with shared responsibility and accountability for the growth of their business. PubWise rose to the top. After a demo and a couple of one-on-one calls, the team selected PubWise as their programmatic ad platform with radical observability and end-to-end connectivity.
In today’s world, it’s hard to find a partner that is there when you need them. It feels like we are working with a family, we know the people at PubWise and can count on them when we need them, no matter what.
-David Wieland, Owner
The Results
Operational efficiency allowed the PetClassifieds team invest their time elsewhere, doubling their traffic and significantly decreasing their ad spend on PPC in less than a year. In fact, their traffic has increased so much that they are having to invest in more hardware to support the traffic on their website, and focus on how to optimize the performance of their website instead of focusing on driving traffic to their website. PubWise has introduced PetClassifieds to incremental opportunities with upstream and video ads. Instead of spending a boatload of money on PPC ads, the team is able to focus on investing in the organic growth of their business.
